Friday 13 August 2010 17.00 EDT
First published on Friday 13 August 2010 17.00 EDT

It's that time of year when normal family activities get put on hold for nine months. The time of year when my wife takes a morning flight to Edinburgh and I follow on the evening one after watching the first home game of the season. The time of year when I take next Tuesday afternoon off to fly to Berne for the first-leg of the Champions League qualifier, sleep in the airport to save money and arrive back at Heathrow airport at 9.15 on Wednesday morning in time to get to work. The time of year when my sanity is questioned more closely than usual.

It goes without saying that being a football fan is a largely pointless activity. Expensive, time-consuming and – unless you support Chelsea, Manchester United or Arsenal – almost always ultimately guaranteed to end in disappointment. It is a one-way relationship; your club has next to no interest in you beyond your credit card. The only reward for your loyalty is getting first refusal on spending yet more money on cup ties and away games.

Yet I, and hundreds of thousands of people like me, couldn't really imagine life any other way. The football season is the way I mark the passing years – key life events remembered by matches won. Or more usually lost. And no matter how big the disappointments of the previous season (it's always the disappointments that linger in the memory: the joy of going to Eastlands to see Spurs clinch fourth place last May has long since passed, while the pain of losing to Portsmouth in the FA Cup semi-final still festers) there's always that vague flicker of possibility and renewal in August. The vanishingly faint hope – but hope nonetheless – that this year will be The Season. Or failing that, the season when the Big Three clubs don't win anything.

The first home fixture of the season is a game like no other. The waiting is over and tribal loyalties resume. However the media may have called it, the World Cup was really just a summer distraction before the main event for most football fans. I've never understood the England fixation. Why would anyone want to pay £40 last Wednesday to watch one second-rate national team play another second-rate national team in a game that was entirely meaningless? To boo? I've nothing against booing your own team. I've booed Spurs from time to time when they all look as if they'd rather be in an Essex nightclub than playing football; with a season ticket costing £850 and most of the players on £40K or more a week, I reckon I've got the right to make my feelings clear. But £40 to boo John Terry at Wembley, when you've already paid to do that at White Hart Lane later in the season, doesn't seem like money well spent.

But there will be no booing when the whistle blows at 12.45pm tomorrow and the season finally gets under way. Well, not until half-time at the earliest. The team will be cheered on to the pitch with each player getting his own roar of approval. And I will be where I always am. In the lower tier of the east stand. I'll enter the ground with a sense of excitement I haven't felt for months. I'll be looking out for familiar faces. I'll resume ongoing conversations with Trevor, Jason and various others that have been rudely interrupted for three months. For a few hours, I'll forget about work, money and general stuff. Who knows? I might even feel happy.

And if Spurs should by any chance take an early lead then I will hug people who were once strangers but have long since stopped being strangers even though I don't know all of their names. And then I shall spend the rest of the match, a match I've been looking forward to for so long, willing it to be over as soon as possible. Go figure.